Open Your Eyes is a 1997 Spanish film co-written, co-scored and directed by Alejandro Amenábar and co-written by Mateo Gil. It stars Eduardo Noriega, Penélope Cruz, Fele Martínez and Najwa Nimri. In 2002, Open Your Eyes was ranked no. 84 in the Top 100 Sci-Fi List by the Online Film Critics Society. The movie's intersecting planes of dream and reality have prompted some critics to suggest comparisons to Calderón's play Life Is a Dream. An American remake entitled Vanilla Sky, directed by Cameron Crowe, was released in 2001, with Penélope Cruz reprising her role.
Plot
A handsome young man wakes up to a female voice telling him to open his eyes. He drives to an empty city. He wakes again, this time to a woman in his bed. He tells her not to leave him messages on his alarm clock. From a prison cell in Madrid, the 25-year-old man, César, tells his story to psychiatrist Antonio while wearing a prosthetic mask. Flashbacks reveal the following events: Good-looking César is attractive to women. At his birthday party, he flirts with Sofía, his best friend Pelayo's date. Later, he takes her home and stays the night, but they do not sleep together. The next morning, César's obsessive ex-lover Nuria pulls up outside Sofía's flat, offering him a ride and sex. On the way to her house, however, she crashes the car with the intent to kill them both. César survives the crash but is horribly disfigured, beyond the help of cosmetic surgery, so he decides to wear a mask to conceal his face. Sofía cannot bear to see him and tries to keep her distance. After César's disfigurement, he begins to have a series of disorienting experiences. Drunk, César falls asleep in the street. On awakening, everything has changed: Sofía now claims to love him and the surgeons restore his lost looks. But as he makes love to Sofía one night, she suddenly changes into Nuria. Horrified, César smothers her with a pillow and kills her. Yet everyone else believes Nuria was indeed the woman everyone else calls Sofía, and he is imprisoned for her murder. While he is confined to the prison, fragments of his past return to him as if in a dream. It is revealed that, shortly after falling asleep drunk on the street, César signed a contract with Life Extension, a company specializing in cryonics, to be cryogenically preserved and to experience extremely lucid and lifelike virtual reality dreams. Returning to their headquarters, under supervision by prison officers, he discovers they specialize in cryonics with a twist: "artificial perception" or the provision of a fantasy based on the past to clients who are reborn in the future. He had committed suicide at home a few months after falling asleep drunk on the street and was placed in cryonic suspension. His experiences from about the midpoint of the movie onward have been a dream, spliced retroactively into his actual life and replacing his true memories. At the end of the film, he decides to wake and be resurrected. Convinced his life since the drunken night in the street is simply a nightmarish vision created by Life Extension, César leaps from the roof of the company's high-rise headquarters, and wakes to a female voice telling him to relax and open his eyes.
Cast
Eduardo Noriega as César, a confident and wealthy young man who has money and is successful with women
Fele Martínez as Pelayo, César's best friend, whose personality is marked by his inferiority complex when it comes to meeting women
Penélope Cruz as Sofía, César's love interest
Najwa Nimri as Nuria, César's former lover, who still has feelings for him
Chete Lera as Antonio, a psychologist who tries to help
Gérard Barray as Duvernois, a representative of the L.E. company
Critical reception
Open Your Eyes received mostly positive reviews. On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an 85% approval rating based on reviews from 46 critics, with a weighted average score of 7.4 out of 10. The site's critical consensus states: "Director Alejandro Amenábar tackles some heady issues with finesse and clarity in Open Your Eyes, a gripping exploration of existentialism and the human spirit". James Berardinelli of ReelViews gave the film three and a half stars, writing that movies "of this intelligence, audacity, and complexity come along so rarely that it's mandatory to cry out their arrival" and that "those who see it will not quickly forget the experience". Rob Blackwelder of SplicedWire gave the film four stars, calling it "a jaw-dropping psychological thriller" that's "beautifully orchestrated". Richard Scheib of The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review also gave Open Your Eyes four stars, writing that it is "quite a remarkable film". Holly E. Ordway of DVD Active wrote "I don’t give out “perfect 10” ratings lightly, but Open Your Eyes earns one by all accounts". However, Aaron Beierle of DVD Talk gave a more lukewarm review, writing that he "found most of Open Your Eyes interesting" but remarked that "there's something about the picture that kept me from being completely involved".
American remake
Director Cameron Crowe's film Vanilla Sky is a remake of Open Your Eyes. It stars Tom Cruise in the lead role, Penélope Cruz reprising her role as Sofia, Cameron Diaz as the woman who disfigures David, Jason Lee as the friend, and Kurt Russell as the psychiatrist. The film also transplants the action from Madrid to New York City. The film follows the original plot very closely but makes several changes to the ending.
